Birth, Death, and Femininity

Philosophies of Embodiment

Edited by Robin May Schott. With contributions by Sara Heinämaa, Robin May Schott, Vigdis Songe-Møller, and Sigridur Thorgeirsdottir

Publication Year: 2010

Issues surrounding birth and death have been fundamental for Western
philosophy as well as for individual existence. The contributors to this volume
unravel the gendered aspects of the classical philosophical discourses on death,
bringing in discussions about birth, creativity, and the entire chain of human
activity. By linking their work to major thinkers such as Heidegger, Nietzsche,
Beauvoir, and Arendt, and to major philosophical currents such as ancient
philosophy, existentialism, phenomenology, and social and political philosophy, they
challenge prevailing feminist articulations of birth and death. These philosophical
reflections add an important sexual dimension to current thinking on identity,
temporality, and community.

Cover

Contents

Acknowledgments

This book is a result of cooperation and dialogue. Over several years we have been studying original sources and contemporary research contributions together, discussing arguments, concepts, and methods for studying birth, death, and femininity. Over this period, we have become indebted to many institutions and individuals, whom we would like to acknowledge here...

One. Introduction: Birth, Death, and Femininity

The concept of death has excited interest from the earliest sources of Western philosophy. In the pre-Socratic tradition, Heraclitus discussed death and birth as two equal principles of life. Death was viewed not as liberation of the soul into an otherworldly realm, but as the becoming of life of another worldly being. Thus, death and birth both belonged to an unending cycle ...

Part 1. Politics of Community

Two. Sexual Violence, Sacrifice,and Narratives of Political Origins

In the present era, we have become familiar with the coupling of sexual violence and political conflicts. When Serbian paramilitary soldiers committed mass rapes against Bosnian Muslims during the wars in the 1990s, it was part of a project of Serbian nation building. And when Hutus raped a quarter-million Tutsi women during the genocide in Rwanda, the violence ...

Three. Natality and Destruction: Arendtian Reflections on War Rape

Sex crimes are perpetrated against women civilians around the world, and appallingly the number of these crimes is increasing rather than decreasing. Amnesty International reports that forty thousand women and girls were raped in the congo in the period 1999-2005. Sexual torture has been documented in Rwanda, the Sudan, Yugoslavia, Iraq, and East Timor (Booth ...

Part 2. Phenomenologies of Mortality and Generativity

Four. The Sexed Self and the Mortal Body

Five. Being towards Death

Martin Heidegger presents his much-discussed and often criticized concept of being-towards-death in Being and Time in chapter 4, which deals with being as care and Dasein's necessary incompleteness.1 In a well-known paragraph on the existential-ontological structure of death, he writes: ...

Six. Future and Others

Already in the 1940s and 1950s several phenomenologists and existentialists problematized the central role that Heidegger gave to death in his interpretation of human existence. The main idea in these early critiques was that the determining horizon of a person's life is not in his own death but in the relations that bind him to other selves of disparate temporalities. Despite ...

Part 3. Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Life

Seven. Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Birth

Friedrich Nietzsche is a philosopher of birth and the body. The metaphor of birth is at the center of his philosophy of embodied life. In his philosophy Nietzsche introduces the conception of birth to convey an understanding of Dionysian philosophy as a form of thinking that is in tune with embodied life as both natal and mortal. By incorporating features that have in the ...

Eight. The Natal Self

Nietzsche's depiction of human encounters as birth and his discussion of the natal self are the basis for an idea of an embodied self that is in a continuous process of emerging. Nietzsche reflects on what it means to be a natal being, which we can achieve primarily through our creative capacities in a way that he suggests is in tune with the emergent character of life itself. ...

Part 4. An Ancient Tragedy

Nine. Antigone and the Deadly Desire for Sameness: Reflections on Origins and Death

Although the Greek philosophers from Heraclitus to Plato lived in the same period as the tragic dramatists, modern philosophers have made few attempts to analyze the relationships between Greek philosophy and the tragedies. Among the exceptions are Hegel and Nietzsche. Despite their considerable differences as philosophers, both Hegel and Nietzsche assess the ...

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